NVIDIA sees ramp up of self-driving cars in 2021/2022

Self-driving cars are another major future growth driver for NVIDIA. Raymond James analyst Christopher Caso asked a question about this market during the third-quarter earnings call of NVIDIA.

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang described the different phases and how they impact the chip designer. Huang is confident that everything that moves will be autonomous someday, but it will take a couple more years before this really starts to drive revenue.

Huang predicts 2018 will be the year that supercomputer revenue will soar as customers will need to buy chips to train their networks, and that 2019 will be the year that robotaxis will start ramping up. Fully automated cars are expected in the 2021/2022 timeframe:

Jen-Hsun Huang
Over the next several years, and if you look at our DRIVE PX platform today, there's over 200 companies that are working on it. 125 startups are working on it. And these companies are mapping companies, they're Tier 1s, they're OEMs, they're shuttle companies, car companies, trucking companies, taxi companies. And this last quarter, we announced an extension of our DRIVE PX platform to include DRIVE PX Pegasus which is now the world's first auto grade full [indiscernible] platform for robotaxis. And so I think our position is really excellent and the investment has proven to be one of the best ever. And so I think in terms of revenues, my expectation is that this coming year, we'll enjoy revenues as a result of the supercomputers that customers will have to buy for training their networks, for simulating the -- all these autonomous vehicles driving and developing their self-driving cars.

And we'll see fairly large quantities of development systems being sold this coming year. The year after that, I think is the year when you're going to see the robotaxis ramping and our economics in every robotaxi is several thousand dollars. And then starting, I would say, late 2022, 2021, you're going to start to see the first fully automatic autonomous cars, what people call level 4 cars, starting to hit the road. And so that's kind of how I see it. Just next year is simulation environments, development systems, supercomputers. And then the year after that is robotaxis. And then a year or two after that will be all the self-driving cars.